Your Company Isn't in New York. Local Law 144 Can Still Reach the Req.
Teams scope this law by asking where the company is or where the applicant lives. Both questions are the wrong one. The obligation follows the location of the position — which is why a nationwide-remote posting is the riskiest req on your board.
The statute attaches to a position, not to a party
Local Law 144 prohibits an employer or employment agency from using an automated employment decision tool to substantially assist a screening decision for a job in the city unless the tool has had a bias audit within the past year, a summary of that audit is published, and candidates received notice at least ten business days before the tool was used.
Read that sentence for what it does not say. It does not say "an employer located in the city." It does not say "a candidate residing in the city." The locative phrase modifies the job. That single grammatical fact is what makes an out-of-state company with zero New York real estate capable of walking into the requirement, and what makes a Manhattan-headquartered company's Denver req fall outside it.
Where your company is incorporated or headquartered
NOT THE TRIGGERA Delaware entity operating from Austin with no New York footprint is still capable of being in scope. Conversely, an NYC-headquartered company hiring exclusively for roles performed elsewhere is not automatically in scope for those roles.
Employment agencies are named alongside employers, so a recruiting firm anywhere in the world that runs an AEDT against candidates for an NYC role is squarely in the frame.
Where the candidate happens to live
NOT THE TRIGGERResidency does not pull a role into scope. A Queens resident applying for a Chicago-based position is applying for a job in Chicago, and the fact that they filled the form in from Queens does not change the location of the work.
This cuts the other way too: you cannot exit scope by noting that a particular NYC-based hire applied from a vacation address.
Where the work will actually be performed
THIS IS THE TRIGGERIf the person you hire will do the job in New York City — full time, hybrid, or as a remote worker sitting in a NYC apartment — the screening that produced that hire was screening for a job in the city.
Hybrid is the clean case and nobody argues about it. A role that is in the office two days a week on West 26th Street is a job in the city, whatever the other three days look like.
"Remote — US" is a req that contains a New York job
Here is the structural problem with a nationwide-remote posting. You screen 4,000 applicants with a ranking model. You interview twelve. You hire one, and that person lives in Astoria and will work from Astoria. Walk the timeline backwards: the tool that cut 4,000 down to twelve was, at the moment it ran, assisting a screening decision for a job that turned out to be performed in New York City.
You did not know that when the model ran. That is precisely why the risk is awkward — the compliance duty is measured at screening time, but the fact that determines scope is fixed at offer time. There is no version of a nationwide-remote req where you can say in advance that no New York City job is inside it. That is what "open to anywhere" means.
Employers resolve this in one of three ways, and it is worth choosing deliberately rather than defaulting:
- Audit and disclose for everything — treat every AEDT as in scope, publish one summary, and put the notice on the careers page. Simplest to operate, and the cost is a single audit rather than a decision tree.
- Restrict the posting geography — list the specific states or metros a remote role is open to, and keep NYC off the list. Legal in itself, but it shrinks the pipeline in the largest US labor market and leaves a public record of the carve-out.
- Stop using the AEDT on open-geography reqs — run the model only on reqs with a fixed non-NYC location and screen the rest manually. Workable at low volume, brittle at scale, and it means the highest-volume funnel is the unaided one.
The four fact patterns, decided
Out-of-state employer, NYC-located role
In scope. Your lack of a New York entity does not matter; the job is in the city and you are using the tool to fill it. This is the pattern most out-of-state teams do not see coming.
NYC employer, role based in another state
Not in scope on these facts. The city address on your letterhead does not extend the ordinance to a Denver position. Do not over-comply reflexively — but do check whether the role has any NYC on-site component.
NYC-resident candidate, role located elsewhere
Not in scope. Residency is not the hook. The risk here is inverted: teams sometimes assume every NYC applicant creates a duty, then build a notice-branching system they did not need.
Remote role, no geographic restriction
Treat as in scope. The req is open to people who will work in the city, and you will not know whether it contained an NYC job until you have already run the screening. Either audit it or bound the geography.
What an out-of-state employer actually has to publish
Once a req is in scope, the duties are the same as they are for a company on Broadway, and two of the three are public web pages — which is the part remote-first companies tend to neglect, because their careers presence is often a third-party job board embed rather than a page they control.
- A published bias audit summary — on a publicly available page, findable from your careers section, dated, and no more than a year old at the moment the tool runs.
- An AEDT notice ten business days ahead — delivered before the tool is used on that candidate, which for a rolling-apply funnel effectively means it lives on the posting itself.
- Notice of the job qualifications and characteristics the tool uses, plus how to request an accommodation or an alternative process where one is available.
If those pages live inside an applicant-tracking iframe, behind a cookie wall, or on a subdomain that renders empty without JavaScript, the disclosure exists in your project plan and not on the web. That distinction is the whole point of a publication requirement.
See what your careers page actually renders
A bias audit summary and an AEDT notice only count if a candidate — or an investigator — can reach and read them. RatedWithAI scans your public pages free and shows you what a real visitor encounters, including the parts that never render.
Scan Your Careers Page for Free →Frequently Asked Questions
We have no office in New York. Does Local Law 144 still apply to us?
It can. The law is written around the position, not the employer. If an automated employment decision tool substantially assists screening for a job that will be performed, at least in part, in New York City, the obligations attach to whoever is using the tool to fill that job — including an employer headquartered in another state or another country. Having no NYC office does not exempt you if you are hiring someone who will work in NYC.
A candidate lives in Brooklyn but the role is based in Austin. Are we in scope?
The applicant's residence is not the trigger. A Brooklyn resident applying to an Austin-based role is applying for a job located outside the city, and the AEDT obligations do not attach on those facts alone. The analysis flips if the role is remote and the person would in fact be working from Brooklyn — then the work is being performed in the city.
What about a fully remote role open to candidates anywhere in the US?
This is the hardest case and the one most teams get wrong. A req that is open to anyone anywhere is, by construction, open to people who will work from New York City. Once you hire a New York City-based person into that req, the screening that got them there was screening for a job performed in the city. Most employment counsel treat nationwide-remote reqs as in scope for that reason, or restrict the posting geography so the question does not arise.
Can we just exclude New York City candidates from the req instead?
Geographic restrictions on a posting are lawful in general, but carving out one city to dodge an audit requirement creates its own problems — it is visible in your posting history, it shrinks your pipeline in the largest US metro, and depending on how the exclusion is implemented it can itself produce a disparate pattern. If the tool is worth using at all, auditing it is usually cheaper than redrawing your hiring map around it.
Does the 10-business-day notice go to every applicant or only NYC ones?
The notice duty runs with the in-scope screening. In practice, teams that post remote roles publish the AEDT notice on the job posting or the careers page for the whole req rather than trying to branch the notice by applicant location, because you often do not know where a person will work until later in the process. Branching the notice by inferred location also means inferring location, which is its own data problem.
We use the vendor's audit. Does it cover our remote reqs?
The audit's validity does not vary by geography — a bias audit is an audit of the tool, not of a req. But scope still matters: if your remote reqs use a different configuration, different knockout questions, or a different module than the one the vendor audited, the summary may not describe the tool that screened those candidates. Confirm the configuration in writing before relying on it.
This article is general information, not legal advice. Scope questions under Local Law 144 turn on the specific facts of a req and on DCWP guidance that continues to develop. Confirm your own exposure with employment counsel before changing how you post or screen.